The Outermost House
| Author | Henry Beston |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Autobiography |
| Publisher | Doubleday, Doran and Co. |
|
Publication date
|
1928 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 222 |
| OCLC | 2228380 |
| LC Class | F72.C3 |
The Outermost House is a book by naturalist writer Henry Beston. It was published in 1928 by Doubleday and Doran and is now published by Henry Holt and Company in New York City. It chronicles a season spent living on the dunes of Cape Cod.
Beston's "Fo'castle," the 20x16 beach cottage which served as the setting for the book The Outermost House, was built in June 1925 and then claimed by the sea in February 1978. Beston (born Henry Beston Sheahan in 1888; died 1968) named the cottage "the Fo'castle" because its ten windows and its commanding presence on top of a dune overlooking the open Atlantic Ocean gave him the feeling of being aboard a ship. Over time, the structure also came to be known as "The Outermost House."
Having spent considerable time on the Cape after completing a magazine assignment called "The Wardens of Cape Cod", about the Coast Guard officers of the Outer Cape, Beston drew up floor plans for a house on the dunes two miles south of the Nauset Coast Guard station in Eastham, Massachusetts. Carpenter Harvey Moore and his crew were the builders.
Beston intended to use the cottage as a retreat to visit whenever he could, but soon found he did not want to leave. "[A]s the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go," he wrote in The Outermost House.
For the next couple of years, Beston would come and go from his dune refuge, keeping extensive notes on his observations of life on the beach. His meditation on surf ("The Headlong Wave"), experiences on the winter beach, and his view of life after his beach stay were molded together into one "Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod."
His observation, "We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals," is frequently quoted by wildlife and animal enthusiasts everywhere.
Beston finally left the "Fo'castle" in September 1927. He returned to his native hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts, and proposed marriage to writer Elizabeth Coatsworth. The couple had an extensive courtship period, but when Coatsworth saw that he had many notes but no manuscript from his stay on the beach, she said, "No book, no marriage." The manuscript was completed by April 1928, and The Outermost House was published in October 1928. Beston and Coatsworth were married in June 1929 and honeymooned at the Fo'castle for two weeks, but the couple seldom returned to the beach cottage after that.
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